Speak up! Why some TV dialogue is so hard to understand

Speak up! Why some TV dialogue is so hard

to understand

27 April 2017, by Lauren Ward

background sounds might be made louder than intended, while the higher pitched voices stay the same volume. This issue is made worse by locating the speakers in the television sets so they point downwards or even backwards.

Credit: BBC

Speaker quality is likely a contributing factor but not all television programmes have suffered the same complaints as SS-GB. Assuming that viewers did not exclusively watch SS-GB with poor quality television speakers, this means there are other factors at play.

Have I heard this before?

Humans are quite good at understanding speech in

Within 24 hours of the first episode of wartime

challenging or noisy situations. Research indicates

drama SS-GB being broadcast the BBC received personal and psychological factors play a role in

100 complaints. Viewers took to Twitter to vent how well we are able to do this. Similarly, these

their frustrations with the sound. Many highlighted factors may affect how we hear dialogue on

their annoyance that SS-GB was just the latest television.

drama to be plagued wit ... audibility problems.

The debate has stretched to the House of Lords, For example, you might find it easy to understand

with peers asking whether consultation with

Bart and Homer's banter in your 500th episode of

broadcasters is needed to address the issue.

The Simpsons while multitasking on Twitter and

making a cuppa. But when the first episode of the

So is making television sound understandable as newest crime drama comes on, you may find that

simple as asking actors to speak up? The short you have to sit down and pay full attention to

answer is: no. Clean recordings and well

understand the speech. How well we understand

enunciated speech will always make dialogue

speech is effected by whether we have heard a

easier to understand. However, the relationship talker, a particular accent or what they are talking

between the audio from our television and what we about before.

understand as speech is much more complex.

The effect of a familiar speaker on how well we

Many news sources and some of the Lords blamed understand speech is termed the "Familiar Talker

"modern flat televisions which ... on picture quality" Advantage". Studies have shown that we are able

than sound quality.

to understand our spouse's voice (a highly familiar

voice) better than unfamiliar voices. Even voices

There is some evidence to support this idea. A

we have only recently heard are easier to

recent studyinvestigating how television s ... eech understand than those we are completely unfamiliar

intelligibility showed the frequency responses (how with.

loud different frequencies are, relative to each

other) in different television sets differed by 10 to How predictable the content of the speech is also

20 decibels. This means the low pitched, rumbling effects how easily we understand it. It has been

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well established that when we have language or the BBC as a way forward for improving television

content cues in the speech, we recognise speech sound for the hard of hearing.

twice as accurately, even in the most challenging of

listening situations. If we hear Homer Simpson's The many factors effecting speech intelligibility

brazen American voice exclaiming "Who ate all the mean that one particular sound mix will rarely make

...", our brains are likely to insert the missing word everyone happy. The provision of "personalisable"

as "doughnut", not "bell peppers". And we probably broadcast mixes, using object based broadcasting,

wouldn't even notice we were doing it.

may be the solution.

Happy Valley, another drama which had similar This article was originally published on The complaints to SS-GB, had accents pointed to as the Conversation. Read the original article. issue. On that occasion, the Lords criticised "indecipherable regional accents". It has been shown, for American English, that some accents are generally har ... derstand than others regardless of your own accent. Though when hearing is greatly challenged by competing noise, speech in your own accent is easier to understand.

Familiarity with an actor's voice, their accent and what they may be speaking about changes our perception of the clarity of dialogue. This does not solve the issue of audibility more generally though.

Provided by The Conversation

I'm no expert, but I know what I like

Part of what makes the problem of audible speech on television difficult to solve is that there is no consensus on what "good sound" sounds like. Even among the barrage of complaints about SS-GB, some found no issue with the dialogue.

Similar patterns have been seen in previous research by the BBC. An experimental football broadcast by the BBC in 2013 allowed viewers to adjust the volume of the crowd compared with the commentary. While most users (77%) agreed that they liked the personalised broadcast, they differed in their preferences. Some balanced commentary and crowd noise while others preferred all crowd noise or all commentary.

The technology which allowed the user to alter the sound mix in the 2013 experiment is called object based broadcasting. In the future, this may allow viewers to alter the levels of different segments of the broadcast based on their preference or their needs on their own televisions. Studies have shown that using the technology in this way can improve speech intelligibility. It has also been proposed by

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APA citation: Speak up! Why some TV dialogue is so hard to understand (2017, April 27) retrieved 6 May 2020 from

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